When I was young, maybe 15 years ago, I had thought about mailing in an idea I had to Elon Musk (I feel so stupid for this now) because back then the most I'd known about him was he set aside hundreds of millions to develop ideas sent in.

I believe we should have a heavily encrypted network designed to be utilized by kids and teachers, a network that requires active licensing to access that needs to be renewed. The network would be sorta like "training wheels" for the Internet.

The goal of this set up was to prevent access to our children's online presence from predators and corporations. Prevent footholds like TIKTOK or Snapchat from ever poisoning the easily influenced minds of our most vulnerable generation.

The idea was that it would be educational based. There would be resources. Only kids could access it, and they would learn about the responsibility of protecting themselves online and protecting their identity with that license they have to access it.

I think kids having phones is important for safety and social mental health, but for texting/phoning, access to the educational network, video chatting with their family etc...a phone for a student might save their life from a school shooter and should never be taken from them, but these apps kids are encouraged to use these days just....foster and grow addictive behaviors and encourage cyber bullying. It's so out of hand and I knew it would get this bad.

I think kids shouldn't even have access to the general Internet until the age of 13 and even then, it should be moderate. Once they graduate from school, it would be complete access. But before that, they should learn everything they need to know about protecting themselves, their devices, their data, their foot print, etc...the digital age grows ever faster year by year and our educational system is sorely lacking to keep up.